Point Reyes Station

On our California trip we stayed several nights in a friend's B&B near Point Reyes Station. Our lodging was officially in Inverness, just across Tomales Bay, but it was an easy drive into town to explore.

Leaving Inverness you cross the famous San Andreas Fault which runs along the California coast. In the 1906 Earthquake the western plate had moved eighteen feet in a few moments of violent shaking, sliding Point Reyes further north. I'm happy to report things were seismically calm the two days we spent there.

The town of Point Reyes Station is almost perfect-twenty miles from the nearest interstate, next door to Point Reyes National Sea Shore, with several gourmet restaurants, and the best latte I've ever tasted-all anchored by a world class independent book store. It's what the guide book calls,  "a mixture of upscale, counterculture, and Mom & Pop."

We parked our Prius to explore, and surprise-five or the six cars parallel parked on the street were hybrids.

On the way up from San Francisco we'd started a list called "Only in California," and the first thing to go on it after we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge was the "Adopt a Highway" sign that credited the Medical Marijuana Patients Union. In Point Reyes I quickly added the community organic garden on Main Street, the mass transit bus called "The Stagecoach," and the menu at the Yoga Toes: "Morning Flow Yoga, Gentle Yoga, Evening Flow Yoga, Restorative Yoga, and Weekend Flow Yoga."

We ordered up espresso drinks at Toby's Feed Barn, a place that sells organic coffee and animal feed. They hold readings in the storage barn when there's a poet in town, and everyone sits on hay bales. My latte had a Chinese character sketched in the foam.

We weren't the first foreigners to discover the charm of this tiny town. Our friend Brett at our B&B had told us that when Prince Charles came to California he stopped in Point Reyes Station to study the organic agriculture of the surrounding community. He also slipped into a main street pub to drink a pint with the owner since he'd heard they shared the same taste in dogs-English pugs.

The pub has a loud speaker on the roof and twice a day at noon and six a long piercing "mooooooooo" sounds instead of a siren, echoing the town's past as a dairy and cattle station on the freight line to ‘Frisco.

Point Reyes Station, Brett had told us, was also the home of "Planet Walker," a man named John Francis who took a vow of silence to protest what humans are doing to the environment and didn't speak for 20 years. He'd walked all over California and ended up here. The chronicles he'd written after he started talking were available signed in Point Reyes Books.

We spent half an hour browsing among the local authors besides Planet Walker-the former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass lives part-time nearby, along with the Wallace Stegner biographer Philip Fradkin. The place seems to grow and nurture writers as easily as it does the nearby fog-bound groves of Biship pines.

"Amazing vibe," I said as I sat on the bench sipping my latte. "I've always heard about ‘raised consciousness,' and I can feel it here."

"Yeah, I'll bet a bunch of these middle-aged people driving hybrids are vets of the ‘Summer of Love,'" Betsy speculated.

"And they've got a sense of humor," I said, pointing out how somehow had changed all the "No Parking" signs along a side street to say "No Barking."

As we drove away from Point Reyes Station Betsy said, "This is like a town in heaven."

I said, "People in the Upstate would remind you that nobody works here, Betsy."

"Yeah, but nobody works in heaven either," she said.